Tom Morello on Solos, Solidarity, and Why the Amp Still Matters
The Nightwatchman and Rage Against the Machine guitarist sits down with Rock Magazine to talk tone, activism, and the one pedal he'd rescue from a fire.
Your solos often sound like they're arguing with somebody. Is that intentional?
Every solo is a speech. I grew up listening to Malcolm X and Public Enemy the same way I listened to Jimmy Page and Randy Rhoads. When I take a solo, I want it to say something — to have a cadence, a rise, a point where it boils over. A solo that's just fast runs up and down the neck is a sentence with no punctuation. I want mine to end with an exclamation point, or sometimes a question mark.
The Digitech Whammy pedal is practically part of your signature. Would you really rescue it from a fire?
After my family and my cats, yeah. That pedal changed the way I think about the guitar. Before it, the guitar had a fixed range — six strings, twenty-two frets, that's your world. The Whammy made the instrument infinite. I can dive two octaves down, scream two octaves up, and do things that no human fingers could physically do. It turned the guitar into a sampler, a turntable, a siren. I own maybe forty of them at this point, in case they stop making them.
You've been outspoken politically your whole career. Do you think rock has gotten too quiet about the things that matter?
Rock has always had two modes: party and protest, and both are valid. But when the entire genre goes into party mode and stays there, something's lost. The bluesmen who built this music were singing about rent and police and dying young. That's the DNA. I'm not saying every song needs to be a manifesto — I love a good dumb rock song as much as anyone — but somebody's got to carry the other torch, or the fire goes out.
What do you tell a young guitarist who wants to sound like you?
Don't. Sound like you. Learn my solos if you want, then throw them away and figure out what your hands want to do that mine don't. The players who changed my life — Hendrix, May, Fripp — none of them sounded like anybody else. Technique is just vocabulary. What you say with it is the whole point.